ASSIMILATING WOMAN TO MAN: AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN NEW YORK, NEW YORK, ON 14 MAY 1858
New York Morning Express 15 May 1858 and New York Times, 15 May 1858. Another text in New York Evening Express, 15 May 1858.
The annual National Woman’s Rights Convention, presided over by Susan B. Anthony, assembled in New York City’s Mozart Hall on 13-14 May 1858. Among the speakers and delegates were Ernestine L. Rose, William Lloyd GarrisonGarrison, William Lloyd

William Lloyd Garrison (1805-79) was the foremost white abolitionist of the nineteenth century and was credited with the discovery of Douglass as a speaker at an antislavery meeting in Nantucket in 1841. He began his career as an apprentice printer on the Newburyport (Mass.) Herald at the age of thirteen. Garrison became editor of the Newburyport Free Press in 1826, but the paper closed within a year. He was then associated with a series of periodicals in Boston that advocated reform before Benjamin Lundy offered the young journalist the opportunity to write for his antislavery newspaper. Garrison joined Lundy in editing the Genius of Universal Emancipation in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1829, during the last year of the paper's 1821-1830 run. In 1830 a libel suit against the editors forced the paper to close and landed Garrison in jail. After his release, he courted the wealthy merchants of New York and Boston in order to start the Liberator (1831-65), a weekly journal based in Boston in which he advocated an immediate end to slavery. Garrison's brand of abolition condemned any institution that would tolerate the existence of slavery, including churches, political parties. and even the United States itself and any scheme aimed at removing black people from the country. Instead, Garrison hoped to raise the public's awareness that slavery was morally wrong and thereby force its end in an almost millennial moment of emancipation. His approach appealed to both white and black antislavery advocates but earned him many enemies among those only moderately opposed to slavery and slaveholders alike. Seeing the need for greater action and organization beyond the pages of the Liberator; Garrison joined with other abolitionists to form the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1831. Two years later he helped found the larger American Anti-Slavery Society. In 1833 he established ties with English abolitionists after a trip to Great Britain, and he later brought the noted and notorious speaker George Thompson to the United States for a tour. Garrison also dedicated himself to women's rights, encouraging women to enter the public sphere by inviting them, via the Liberator, to form female antislavery societies. In addition to the thirty-three women's antislavery societies that flourished by 1838, Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society welcomed women as well as blacks into its ranks. However, female delegates were excluded from the World's Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840 in London. The issue of women's participation in the antislavery movement and Garrison's absolute refusal to turn to politics to end slavery caused a division in the American Anti-Slavery Society. Brothers Lewis and Arthur Tappan, who opposed women's acting as speakers and who hoped to use politics toward abolition, broke with Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society, forming the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, or the "New Organization" in 1841. Garrison's ideas were so closely associated with the "Old Organization" that the American Anti-Slavery Society became known simply as the "Garrisonians." With the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, Garrison believed that he had accomplished his life's work and that of the antislavery movement. He then resigned from the presidency of the American Anti-Slavery Society and closed the Liberator. Wendell Phillips Garrison and Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879: The Story of His Life Told by His Children, 4 vols. (New York, 188589); Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York, 1998); James Brewer Stewart, William Lloyd Garrison and the Challenge of Emancipation (Arlington Heights, Ill., 1992); John L. Thomas, The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison (Boston, 1963); Dictionary of American Biography, 20 vols. (New York, 1928-36), 7:168-72. , Sarah Grimké, and Sarah Parker Remond. Exchanges between platform speakers and several men in the audience, including a “well hen-pecked" husband, over the proper rights and duties of each sex occupied much of the morning session on the second day. Despite a call for a dinner recess, the audience prevailed upon Douglass, who had attended the previous day's session, to speak. His brief remarks echoed sentiments earlier endorsed at the convention by the Reverend Antoinette L. Brown and Lucy Stone. New York Times, 14 May 1858; New York Daily Tribune, 14 May 1858; New York Herald, 14 May 1858.
Loud calls were made for “Douglass,” when Fred. Douglass took the stand, and delivered a speech in behalf of woman’s rights. Having experienced slavery in his own person, it was impossible that he could be indifferent to any call for freedom. He based the rights of woman to freedom and to equality with man upon the same grounds on which he advocated the right of the slave to freedom and equality with the white race. (The only difficulty that, in his opinion, existed anywhere in relation to this question was one that arose less out of the idea of rights than out of the idea of duties, or the idea of the possibilities of woman. What could woman do? had been asked and answered generally, but he was inclined to think that woman herself was uneducated in a fuller notion of what she could do.)¹From the New York Times, 15 May 1858. He believed a woman could do anything a man could do, and by so doing could assimilate herself to man. If she handled the grubbing hoe instead of the needle her hands would become large and horny just as men’s hands do. There was no inherent principle of beauty in woman more than in man, for if they were to change places man would assume all that delicate texture of skin and beauty which woman has in her present position. He advocated the carrying out of the woman‘s rights idea among the poorer classes, and instanced the fact of a man now building a house who was assisted by his wife in laying the bricks, splitting the wood, &c., and in such cases he saw

the same hard features, hands, &c., both in man and woman. On the plantation a woman was expected to hoe as many rows in a day as a man, and in consequence acquired physical strength and health; therefore a woman need not be afraid to go out West, for nature would furnish her gloves of steel as well as the man. Let women go out there and do as in England, where the finest women, in his estimation, were working in the field.